Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The popular talk-show star Regina Casé received me in her extravagant mansion, wearing a flowing caftan, at least five pounds of jewelry, and a cosmetics counter’s worth of makeup. “I’ve been to North America and to Europe,” she said. “You have a pine woods. You have a grove of oak trees. Have you been in our Atlantic rainforest? We have a hundred kinds of trees, everything is growing on top of everything else, it’s all competing for the sun and the water, and somehow it all survives, more lush than anywhere else in the world. That’s the social structure of Rio, too. Just as our Amazon is providing the oxygen for the world, we make social oxygen here. If you don’t learn to integrate your societies the way we’ve integrated ours, you’re going to fail. In America, you have a lot of problems, a lot of injustice, a lot of conflict. You try to solve the problems.” She threw up her hands in mock horror. “In Rio, we invite all the problems to a big party and we let them dance together. And we’re inviting the world to come here and dance, too.”

In August 2014, four years after I reported this story, I spent a few days in Rio. By then, UPPs were serving some 1.5 million people living in or near almost forty favelas, at staggering cost. Nine thousand police officers had received training to decriminalize and reinvigorate the favelas; in 2016, that number is expected to exceed twelve thousand. From 2009 to 2014, gang and police killings in the pacified favelas fell by half, and rates of other violent crimes dropped even more dramatically. The New York Times reported that students in the pacified favelas were performing twice as well as the average Rio student.

Despite this progress, the Institute of Social and Political Studies found that nearly half of Rio’s favelas remained under the control of vigilante militias; more than a third were in the hands of drug gangs; and fewer than one in five had a UPP presence. Between 2011 and 2013, the Police Ombudsman’s Office received nearly eight thousand complaints of police violence including assault, rape, torture, and murder—yet only eighteen officers were sanctioned as a result. A recent Amnesty International study found that on-duty police officers were responsible for 1,519 homicides in Rio over five years—nearly one out of every six of the total homicides registered in the city. In most instances, the UPP Social charged with providing medical, sports, and educational services simply failed to materialize.

The report Exclusion Games, issued at the end of 2015 and compiled primarily by NGOs, chronicled abuse of children’s rights and basic civil liberties in the lead-up to the 2016 Summer Olympics. It noted an uptick in police violence as the pacification program wobbled, and charged that more than four thousand families had now lost their homes while another twenty-five hundred were under threat of similar displacement. Further, it reported the disappearance of several street children in episodes of so-called social cleansing. The Rio government has disputed some of these allegations.

Then there is the matter of Amarildo. On July 14, 2013, a construction worker with epilepsy named Amarildo de Souza, who lived in the Rocinha favela, was seen entering the local police station. He was never seen coming out. He was classed as “missing” for two months, until enormous demonstrations across Rio with thousands of people chanting “Where is Amarildo?” finally led to an investigation. Ten officers, including the head of Rocinha’s UPP, were accused of torture—including electric shocks and putting the man’s head in a plastic bag—and then concealing his corpse.